Terrific performances and an ingenious production design cannot salvage the perplexing jumble that is Kenley Smith’s big-ideas sci-fi-parody-fantasy-thriller black comedy Akuma-Shin, a Sacred Fools Theater Company World Premiere, any more than its cast of characters—Dr. Joyce Brothers, William F. Buckley, Jr., Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer among them—are able to save Tokyo from Godzilla.

 Joining pioneer TV journalist Nancy Dickerson (Stasha Surdyke) to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the night a gigantic dinosaur-like prehistoric beast destroyed Japan’s capital city, Brothers (Libby Baker), Buckley (David Wilcox), Capote (Amir Levi), and Mailer (Paul Parducci) provide Akuma-Shin with its brightest, Saturday Night Live-style moments as a quartet of celebrity writers known as much for their idiosyncrasies as they were for their bestsellers.

 Where Smith’s play fails to engage (or make decipherable sense) is in its series of overlong, pseudo-profound flashbacks of Tokyo’s destruction as seen by a) a trio of American journalists (Tony DeCarlo’s Mason Burr, Eddie Goines’s Billy Childers, and Reuben Uy’s George Serizawa) reporting back home from high atop the city’s tallest skyscraper;

 b) novelist Yukio Mishima (Uy) and his faithful servant Gojira* (Victor S. Chi) discussing how Akuma-Shin’s arrival might help them recover their lost samurai honor; and c) bomb-crazy General Curtis LeMay (Parducci) going all gung-ho to nuke the beast over the protests of his pilot (Adam Burch).

Lee Harvey Oswald (Burch) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Goines) show up along the way, the former as a major elected public office holder, the latter sporting orange convict garb as befits his incarceration. (Since we’ve already been told that Richard Nixon beat John F. Kennedy by a landslide in ’60, their rewritten histories, while nonsensical, don’t come as that much of a surprise.)

Last but not least, a flash-forward has elderly Akuma-Shin survivor Emiko Ogata (Corinne Chooey) visiting a Goleta, California primary school for a Q&A monolog that, like the multiple flashbacks before it, goes on about twice as long as needed.

As to whether playwright Smith intended for his play to serve as a metaphor for authentic past events or the spate of recent and semi-recent disasters depicted in the production’s video montage epilog, your guess is as good as mine.

 Not that Akuma-Shin is a total loss, not when director Scott Leggett has Baker, Levi, Parducci, Surdyke, and Wilcox doing some of the most hilarious takes I’ve seen on Brothers, Capote, Mailer, and Buckley (though you probably need to be at least fifty to know why the impressions are so spot-on) and their eleventh-hour Mike Mahaffey-choreographed fight sequence soars deliciously over the top.

 Burch, Chi, Chooey, DeCarlo, Goines, and Uy are all very good too—and Parducci quite sensational—even if the scenes they’re in border on the pretentious. (The Mishima-Gojira flashback would work much better minus fake Japanese accents since they’re speaking their native tongue, not second-language English.)

 Scenic designer Joe Jordan’s triangular set, initially the PBS studio where the Akuma-Shin retrospective is being taped, hides multiple surprises behind its rice-paper screens. Costume designer Jennifer Christina DeRosa scores high marks for her 1970s polyester fashions and other assorted period wear as do Emily Bolka, Curt Bonnem, and Faith Sulock for their video contributions, Bo Powell for props ranging from ‘50s-era radio transmitters to traditional samurai swords, and Matt Richter for his multiple striking lighting design effects. Sound designer Jaime Robledo and composer Michael Teoli complete the top-notch production design with a sci-fi-movie-ready soundtrack.

Akuma-Shin is produced for Sacred Fools by Brian W. Wallis. K.J. Middlebrooks is associate producer and Powell is assistant director. Joe Fria is movement consultant. Tim Kopacz is dramaturg.

Suze Campagna is stage manager and Harim Sanchez and Mark Russell are assistant stage managers.

Pete Caslavka, Isaac Deakyne, Hennie Hendrawati, Carrie Keranen, Corey Klemow, Gavin Lee, Sean Liang, K.J. Middlebrook, Marz Richards, Glenda Suggs, and Travis York are understudies. Kazumi Zatkin voices the Tokyo Emergency Announcer.

Program notes reveal Smith and Leggett’s intentions to “ruminate on the lurking unknown of the nightmare” and “explore the longterm impact of our past on our present and future,” lofty goals that do not pan out as planned. Some of its individual parts may succeed, but as a whole, Akuma-Shin does not.

*Japanese for Godzilla

The Broadwater Main Stage, 1076 Lillian Way, Hollywood.
www.SacredFools.org

–Steven Stanley
March 30, 2018
Photos: Jessica Sherman Photography

Tags: Kenley Smith, Los Angeles Theater Review, Sacred Fools Theater Company